Tag: onenote

OneNote for iPad crashes frequently

I am a big fan of Microsoft OneNote, and I am using OneNote for iPad, but I was experiencing frequent crashes of the iPad application.

Some tests and some searches later, I learned that I was not alone, and that the crashes are caused by OneNote pages that contain a table with meeting information (when you create a new Linked Meeting Note from an appointment in an Outlook calendar item). So try to avoid that, or remove the table from the note if you are syncing with iPad.

Update: Microsoft updated OneNote for iPhone/iPad on July 1, 2013, and this update fixes this issue !

Microsoft OneNote available for iPad

Last week, Microsoft released the OneNote app for iPad in the app store. It is the first version of the app, and still lacks some functionality I would like to see added, but it is a great first step. These are the things you should know:

  • the app is free, but is limited to 500 notes; if you want more, you can unlock this limitation with an 11,99 EUR in-app purchase. I consider myself a heavy OneNote user, and I am currently at 320 pages. So with some management, you can stay under the limit.
  • Notes are synced with Windows Live Skydrive, so you will need a Windows Live ID to use the app. Advantage is that you have an online backup of your notes, and you can even edit them on Skydrive in the web app.
  • If you use formatting extensively in OneNote, you will be disapponted that a lot of these features are not supported in the iPad app. You get plain text. There is some room for improvement here.
  • Written notes (ink on a tablet pc) are not visible in the iPad app. Sometimes the app crashes on pages that contain a lot of written notes.

There is also an iPhone version of the application. And if you are thinking about converting your entire Evernote archive to OneNote, my colleague Frank pointed us to a conversion tool. Although you might want to wait with that until the 2.0 version of the OneNote app is released…

 

Sharing a OneNote notebook: always a good idea!

For a lot of people, Microsoft OneNote is the electronic alternative of their
“little black book” that they take to meetings, to write down their action items
and notes. But it is much more than that. One of my favorite features is the
sharing of notebooks. This allows you to store your notebook on
a central location (e.g. a SharePoint site, a file share, or even on Windows
Live Skydrive), and use it with multiple people. Why would you and your
colleague carry your own little black book if you are working on the same
project?

Even if you do not want to share your notes, it is still a good idea to store
your notebook on SharePoint or Skydrive. If you put it on a location where only
you have access, this will create the perfect backup of your
notes, because your notebooks will automatically synchronise between your pc and
the shared location. You don’t want to lose your little black book, do you?

The video below shows you how to setup a shared notebook. Tip: maximize the
video and watch in HD for a better viewing experience.

Stubborn OneNote: cannot rename notebook section

My favorite note-taking tool, Microsoft OneNote, has been bothering me for quite a while with a strange issue: for some reason, it renamed a section called “Customer notes” to “Customer notes 2”, and I could not change it back.

After some investigation, this was the origin of the problem:

  • My notebook was synced to a SharePoint document library
  • It was probably called “Customer notes” before, but a sync conflict added a second section “Customer notes 2”
  • I deleted “Customer notes” and tried to remove the 2 in “Customer notes 2”, but no luck.

The cause: when you have a section that contains attachments, OneNote creates a subfolder called <name of section>_onefiles. When I deleted the section “Customer notes”, it did NOT delete the folder “Customer Notes_onefiles”. That’s why I could not rename “Customer notes 2” to “Customer notes”, because the corresponding subfolder “Customer notes_onefiles” already existed.

I deleted the old “Customer notes_onefiles” and then I could rename my section. I’m a happy OneNoter again !